Funnily enough, here in Littleton everyone gets a 3 minute limit at Town Meeting, apart from the board presenting the article which gets 10 minutes. At least here though, if something has made it to Town Meeting, the important discussions have already happened.

Yeah, I saw what a mess the unemployment system is, there's no way there won't be collateral damage. Plus, didn't we just have a big tax surplus? Why is it so important that we snatch this money back?

You're not wrong, but the unions have been pointing to a lot of problems in the railroad industry that may have led to this specific incident. Respecting union rights would be a half measure - really the issue is the major railroads are particularly awful at actually running a railroad (not just this incident, but the whole "precision scheduled railroading" implementation), and should probably be nationalized.

Ok, sounds like we're closer in thinking than I thought then. I think you're underselling socialized housing somewhat - it's definitely less efficient at a smaller scale, but if you need a lot of housing in bulk then that central planning becomes a benefit. I think some combination of both (such as in Austria) could work, but no fully market-based solution is going to cover everyone.

I guess the thing is, I know price controls can make the supply situation worse. I think the impact is overblown - there's still going to be developers who can turn a profit if the controls aren't too onerous, but there is a negative impact. In my opinion though, it's a worthwhile sacrifice in the short term to avoid evictions and displacement.

There's got to be some sort of compromise here, IMO - like, that's why I mentioned 10% (very arbitrarily), it's still above inflation usually, still allows for developer profit, but doesn't allow for insane price hikes all in one go. With enough supply, that kind of rent control would be de facto pointless anyway. The places where rent control failed are usually because they never bothered to actually fix the supply constraints. Maybe artificially lowering the price a little didn't help the supply, but single family zoning and long arbitrary approval processes for multi family housing are a much more significant artificial limit to supply. I don't think it's all or nothing - there's a certain amount of rent control you can get away with if you remove enough supply restrictions, there's got to be some sort of balancing act possible here.

I guess what I'm saying is, the whole concept of rent control shouldn't be written off just because people expect it to "solve housing". It's an often misused tool with some drawbacks, and there are better ways of providing housing stability (such as social housing), but when done properly it can be a net positive. Or put more succinctly, rent control of a private market is probably the worst way to reduce evictions and sudden rent hikes, but it is a way of doing that. And apparently that's the best we can expect from our politicians :/

I mean, I thought I was pretty clear above that insufficient supply is the much larger problem, but if you want to claim I'm "misunderstanding" then go ahead I guess.

The thing is, high prices may not be "the problem", but they are very much a huge problem in and of themselves. I would go as far as to say that yes, these prices combined with a lack of supply are in fact an emergency. High prices for housing are highly correlated with homelessness, and a free market will never find a profitable way to supply decent housing to the homeless. Even if sufficient construction brings prices down for most people, they're still getting left behind.

Like, it's great that you went into that whole explanation about how markets work, but you're totally missing the bigger picture here. The problem is that a fundamental human need like housing should not be subject to the whims of the market. Housing is not, and can never be, a truly free market, for several reasons:

• Housing values incentivize NIMBYism: supply shortages increase prices, which encourage people to put in market controls that further restrict supply and increase value
• The cost of moving is significant, and gives landlords leverage that tenants will never have. It's not just financial impacts, moving can also disrupt children's education, and generally disrupt the feeling of stability and "home".
• You can't just not buy housing. There are plenty of goods that you can just not buy if they're too expensive. Housing is not one of them.
• The net result is landlords have so much more power than tenants, which hardly makes it a balanced market to begin with.

I think that markets are a very useful tool that can actually build a lot of housing if we get rid of some of the blockers. But they're not some sort of fundamental law of the universe that cannot be interfered with. And if they're so fragile that even some sort of barely adequate 10% rent increase cap, for instance, will "utterly destroy" them, then maybe there's a bigger problem here.

I mean you're not wrong - if rent control/stabilization only applies to some rentals, and you don't adequately expand housing alongside it, you're just shifting the impact. I think it mostly makes sense as an emergency measure - stop people from getting kicked out first, then actually fix things.

Really though, what this boils down to is that a basic human need (shelter) is tied up in a market - a market which is never going to cover everyone's needs if left to its own devices. At the very least, rent control is a blunt instrument to help protect some of the most vulnerable (IMO), but it's a bandaid on a broken system to begin with. Rent control creates perverse incentives because the whole housing market is already full of perverse incentives. But ultimately, I don't think anyone should be allowed to jack up rents to such an extent that it puts people on the streets. And if putting such a minor piece of basic decency into law breaks the housing market, then we have way bigger problems.

Seriously - the MBTA Communities Act is a start, but it's still ultimately up to individual towns, which is not exactly confidence-inspiring

So apparently this is an unpopular opinion, but here it goes: We need some form of rent control, but by itself rent control will not do anything to help the housing crisis. Rent control makes sure that people don't get evicted from their homes just because a landlord decides they want to charge way more. It gives stability to people who rent, something which I don't think you can undersell.

Having said that, it's a bandaid. It addresses a symptom of the problem. It does absolutely nothing to address the main cause of the housing crisis, basic supply and demand. We need more housing, and while I think the best route is public mixed-income developments, at this point literally anything is better than the status quo. Rich NIMBYs are the real problem, don't lose sight of that.

I have a half-English half-American accent (born in England, grew up on the NY side of CT), but there was one time in Boston that someone confused it with a stereotypical Boston accent. So, maybe a tiny bit?